Why should every developer care about monitoring?

Jan 28, 2017

Building a new digital service from scratch has never been easier. There are plenty of libraries, frameworks, platforms and service providers that make it possible to get our ideas into production in a matter of days if we push the envelope. We also have pretty good practices on how to develop software in general, accompanied with tooling and processes to deploy changes to production safely.

However, there is still a significant disconnect between development and operations regardless of all the DevOps buzz. Developers code, configure infrastructure and take care of the deployments. But then, there is the infamous someone who takes care of the operations and monitoring. I call this approach DevOpsBut, which might ring a bell for those familiar with ScrumBut.

Production should be every developer’s primary concern

The harsh reality is that our code creates value only when it runs in production. Regardless of how well we implement and test our code, none of our development elegance can guarantee that our service runs smoothly in production. There are just too many moving pieces in the puzzle.

From a bookkeeping perspective, we can think of our codebase as a liability, and it can only be considered an asset when it is delivering business impact in production. Therefore having operable software should be every developer’s top concern.

Any non-trivial software system contains essential complexity which is inherent to the domain. There is no way around that. We also tend to be guilty of building some amounts of accidental complexity by our designs regardless of how hard we try to avoid it. With that said, the only way to be in control of such a complex system in production is to measure the key business metrics and have a close eye on them continuously.

What could possibly go wrong?

First, our customers can interact with our service in the most peculiar ways, which can lead to unexpected results and errors. Different end user devices, desktop and mobile browsers included, provide many browser quirks. There is no limit to the amount of manual exploratory testing to avoid this.

Second, it is possible that our user interface is too complicated, and our end users cannot get the desired actions done. In this case, everything is fine from a technical perspective - not a single trace of error anywhere, but neither are there any expected business transactions happening. Without business metric based monitoring we are happy while our customers are frustrated. How uncomfortable is that?

Third, software is turtles all the way down. For example, the downstream dependencies can become unavailable, or even worse, start responding slowly. Some parts of our core infrastructure might melt away for whatever reason. In a complex system, a small, innocent-looking anomaly can cause cascading failures, which might not seem interrelated. Due to concurrency, the sequence of events can be non-linear. These are scenarios that are close to impossible to foresee during development.

Optimize for Mean Time to Recovery

In general, there are two methods of quality assurance. One approach is to make sure there are no bugs introduced in the first place. We focus our efforts on carefully testing our systems before deploying to production. With this laborious approach, the frequency of bugs found is small. This is all about optimizing the mean time between failures, or MTBF. The goal is to minimize the number of bugs and maximize the time between outages, regardless of the cost.

Another approach is to make sure that whenever an anomaly happens in production, we know it in the very first second and have detailed diagnostic data. With a proper deployment pipeline in place, we can fix the problem quickly, and the impact of this failure is small in both scale and time. Such thinking optimizes the process for mean time to recovery, or MTTR. Bug count is not the primary concern. Instead, we make sure that we are aware of any exceptions within the first second and can fix them promptly.

My question now is that would you rather live with the illusion of having perfect codebase surrounded by an ideal environment, or having state of the art tools in place to inform you when the unexpected happens in production? To be the first one to know of any issues. Or in contrast to have customers report them. Which one of these approaches make you sleep better during nights? Since resources are limited and software is complex, I would try to minimize the mean time to recovery over maximizing mean time between failures.

It is time to start measuring outcomes

Monitoring merely technical data is better than nothing, but it will only get us halfway there. The next step is to start monitoring KPI’s in real time. For an online web store, this can be the amount of logged in users, signups, shopping cart checkouts or payments. When we have collected the baseline figures for these transactions, we can setup alerts which are triggered on unexpected drops or peaks in our service metrics. Now we know when our service is healthy from the business perspective as well.

By monitoring business transactions, we can start to measure the impact of our releases. It can be an incredible game changer in the way we develop software. Instead of focusing on output and features such as “customer can sign up using social login”, we can start to measure outcomes like “we get more customers signing up for our service.” Now we can optimize development efforts on business goals using data. It is a fundamentally different approach compared to prioritizing work based on the highest paid person’s opinion.

Towards Operations-Driven Development

Getting proper monitoring in place is a bit similar to a well-crafted test suite or application security. It is not easy to wire these on top of the application later. Things like elementary server monitoring and health checks are easier to achieve compared to going all the way with an MTTR-optimized development process.

Should developers focus on monitoring and stop writing automated tests? Of course not, that would be insane. There are numerous reasons for having a test suite in place. Tests are our safety net. They allow us to develop features faster, enforce modular design, and help in documenting system behavior.

Monitoring is our safety net in the most critical environment: production. Therefore, all developers should ensure that their applications are robust from an operations perspective as well. All we need is to add a bit of “operations-driven development” mentality to our daily development routines. But then how do we take care of all this in practice? Well, that is another story and another blog post.

Author info

Building solutions with my Wunderful fellow coders at Wunderdog ltd in Helsinki, Finland. Interested in clean code, frontend, backend, automation, devops, agile, lean and keeping the feedback loop short. Always focused on delivering business capabilities and most importantly, business impact. Professional since 2001.

Ville Komulainen

Building solutions with my Wunderful fellow coders at Wunderdog ltd in Helsinki, Finland. Interested in clean code, frontend, backend, automation, devops, agile, lean and keeping the feedback loop short. Always focused on delivering business capabilities and most importantly, business impact. Professional since 2001.